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Cross Skilling is starting to happen and already there are fewer bottlenecks. John is starting to have more time to step back from the day to day and look at the big picture. He’s heard that most Scrum teams become more productive over time and he wonders how is team is doing. He pulls up the CFD for the current release:

and immediately notices that the rate at which stories are being selected has slowed down in the past few sprints. Historically the team has a trailing average of 30 story points a sprint. In the past few sprints they’ve only achieved 25 and 22. Is this drop meaningful? Is it related to the team’s cross skilling efforts? John decides to ask the team what is going on. He writes a short note, describing the problem he’s seen (without his own suspicions) and asks the team to reflect on the discovery. After Daily Scrum John invites the team members to talk about the problems they see:

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Due to an unfortunate mistake on my part the RSS feed hasn’t been updating correctly since the beginning of November. You should now see 7 posts that you missed in that time.

Its day four of the sprint and ScrumMaster John is studying the Story + Task wall to see how the sprint is progressing. After a few minutes he sees three things that standout:

Analysis

The team is currently blocked on Martin’s database related tasks. However even if that bottleneck were resolved they would still be blocked on Ian’s tasks.

The team isn’t respecting its own WIP limits. Read More…

This episode has been brought to you by a quick trip to California.

Tom Stafford wrote about his use of Psychology to avoid Bystander Apathy. Interesting his approach point to a specific person (or persons) and tell them exactly what to do has been standard training for first aiders for years.

Sharp Brains had an excellent series “Under­stand­ing the Human Brain and How It Responds to Stressâ€:

Study Hacks described a study of elite vs average violin players. The difference in their practice wasn’t their dedication, on average they spent the same amount of time – it was how they practiced. Elite players spent time stretching their skills, pushing their boundaries and practicing the uncomfortable. In addition elite players consolidated their practice into well defined blocks (two a day) vs. the average who spread their practice through out the day.

Stephanie West Allen shares evidence that SWOT analysis may lead us to dead ends.

Garth Sundem suggests that “Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrongâ€. In an interview with Robert Bjork it is suggested our learning model of attempting to master one skill before moving onto the next might be completely wrong.

In a New York Times article: “The Rise of the New Groupthink†this week Susan Cain claims that teams and collaborative work give rise to groupthink. Groupthink is not out of the question, as Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate in “The Invisible Gorilla†group think is a risk – cite the example of the Georgian War in 2008:

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The team are holding a daily standup mid-sprint. During the meeting Tonia the world’s best tester answers the obstacles question by saying: “The test server is down for the third time this week and I will spend the day writing new test cases.” Meanwhile Doug doesn’t raise any impediments but notes that he has spent his third day trying to write Unit Tests for a previously completed class (Ed: The team doesn’t know about Test Driven Development yet). This task was originally estimated to take one day. Read More…

This question often comes up. Usually because a team has become bored with their retrospectives. I suggest you don’t use the same style or format more three times running. The question came up again today with a person saying that their team was doing well and had achieved a steady state. To my mind steady state isn’t the point of Scrum. Scrum is a tool to help you be the best in your industry. Scrum should be a tool you use to disrupt an industry. To that end the next time you tell me that I hear that you’re team is a good as it gets my reply will be: “Ask the team what it would take for them to be the best in their industry, worthy of a case study on Infoq or a major conference presentation. Everything between the team and that case study is an impediment. Go forth and remove the impediments”. Read More…

Organizational Neuroscience: Taking Organizational Theory Inside the Neural Black Box is both the most significant and also most complex article I’ve read this month. Its a survey of key findings from the realm of neuroscience that the authors feel will be relevant to “Organizational Researchers”. Unfortunately being a research paper I find the language very stilted but it was still worth the effort.

Last week at Agile Tour Toronto I had the privilege of working with my friend Paul Heidema to help introduce the basic concepts of Scrum in 60 minutes. This is a really interesting challenge, what’s the minimum amount you can teach people and still give them a taste of Scrum. In end we opted for about ~10 minutes of talking heads (spread throughout), ~30 minutes of simulation time and 15 minutes of debrief.

We invited our teams to create Children’s Books of the Goldilocks story. Along with the basic Story participants were asked to offer advertising, public service announcements etc.

Comments from participants:

Feel free to use this simple simulation to help teach the very basic concepts of Scrum.

Part of an ongoing series called Scrum Master Tales. The series covers ScrumMaster John and his team as they develop an online bookstore.

Last time we read about our team they were suffering from a very high rate of interruptions after the product had gone live: The Story of Production Support.

After another couple of sprints using the one “person off†strategy the production support problem wasn’t completely fixed but the team was starting to spend less time on support. However John started to notice a new problem, even though production support wasn’t the primary cause there were still alot of interruptions, he still noticed that team members were being interrupted (a mix of drop by, phone calls and email).

John spent the next few days just taking notes on the interruptions. Discounting friends dropping by for coffee or smokes and calls on personal phones (presumably family or friends), he could still see that his team members were being bothered 2-3 times a day. Taking the best notes he could without outright spying on people, some of the interruptions were obvious:

To track these issues John didn’t need to spy, he just watched the flow of people in and out of the team space, listened for phone calls and read the email trail that filled his inbox.

Once John noticed the issue he mentioned into a standup and asked people to start tracking what sort of interruptions they had. In the retrospective the team discussed sources of interruptions (again using a timeline as reminder). Read More…